afdenahy

My host has fixed the problem:
We have investigated the root cause of the issue and it is a type of iframe hacking from an Serbian IP which got into one of the customised php scripts of one of the clients and then got FTP access of domains and modified the pages.

We have removed that script and banned the IP and process of removing that hacked script . Your account has been cleaned.

Thanks for the beaut bbPress theme Trent.
Anthony

I had this problem. Here is my solution.

I had this problem. Here is my solution.

I have just upgraded my WordPress site from 2.04 to 2.2.1 using Fantastico. After the upgrade, many posts had the strange characters.
eg. na€?We shape our dwellings, then afterwards our dwellings shape our livesa€|a€?,

should be:“We shape our dwellings, then afterwards our dwellings shape our lives…”

This problem is I think caused by people cutting and pasting from Word documents. So, we can prevent future problems by not doing this, but how do we fix a website full of these characters?

This is what I did, step by step:

1. I located my database backup which I had produced using the WordPress Database Backup plugin ver. 1.7. This backup file was a text file containing a lot of sql and data. I opened the file in Notepad++ (notepad-plus.sourceforge.net), changed the Format from Encode in ANSI to UFT-8, then saved. Make sure you see that the weird characters change to nice ones when you change the format.

2. I used the Import button in phpMyAdmin (cPanel:mySQL Databases). This button is near the bottom of the entry screen in phpMyAdmin.

3. I browsed to my backup file on my computer, and accepted the default settings, including UTF8. Then Go.

4. I then browsed to my site, Mount Alexander Sustainability Group. What a shock! All the posts had disappeared, and there was an error message. My heart sank – what had I done! Did this mean that the backup file was useless? I checked the database via cPanel – it looked OK. I then entered Site Admin on my website, and thank goodness there was a message that said that WordPress was out of date and had to be updated. Clicked on the provided link and suddenly all was right – website intact, and no strange characters anywhere!!

I fixed this problem by:
1. changing the status of the most recent post to Draft to determine if that post was the cause. It was.
2. since this post was just a photo, I tried reducing its width. This did the trick.

Now I need to look at the structure of the page layout, and the css to see if it can be made more robust.. ie. rogue post proof. The sidebar should not be influenced by the main content.